Earlier in June, I was busy working on 20+ illustrations for this book called《觀城記－－做個有情有義的香港人》, written by 天航 and published by {格子盒作室 | gezi workstation}. The book is now published and is available at the HK Book Fair; it should be available at book stores such as The Commercial Press after the book fair too.

It was an interesting experience to work on this project. I spent quite a lot of time on research, especially when drawing the landmark places and the celebrities. The drawing style is quite different from my usual style, as I found myself drawing more carefully and I tried to attend to more details. Usually, I don’t even made pencil sketches for my ink drawings and my ink drawing by itself would look kind of incomplete without adding color. However, while working on this book, I found myself not only drawing pencil sketches, I kept making changes to some tiny details. As I was told that only a few drawings might be printed in color, and I didn’t know which one will get picked, I had to draw them all as if they will only be printed in black and white first. It was a good experience to challenge myself to try something different and I’m happy about how it turned out.

As I was rushing for the last few drawings, Singapore was affected by the most horrible haze in history. It was so bad that I can smell the smoke once I got out of the bedroom, which has air conditioning. I tried working on my work table but I just couldn’t stand the nasty smell and had to retreat back to my bedroom. The following is one of the drawings that I drew on my bed instead of proper drawing table. I think I had drawn more than 100 motorbikes including the drafts…

Taipei Motorbikes

Thanks to the editor of the book, Ah Ding, who is also a good friend of mine, for inviting me to join this project; and to the author of the book, 天航, who kindly agree to use my illustrations. It is a really amazing feeling to see a book with my illustrations published, it made me smile just to think about it. :)

Second studio class is about blind contour… I’ve always loved blind contour drawings… it’s so relaxing to do it and the result is always surprising.. It’s great fun to draw human figures with the blind contour technique…

I enjoyed my first studio class… a classmate brought this amazing piece of ‘brick’ to the class and we spent 3 hours drawing different angles of it using different media…

I started with my trusty fountain pen (the middle drawing), drawing pretty much what i see from where I was sitting. Then I went to get a graphite stick and tried it for the first time (the drawings on the left). I did a blind contour drawing (upper left) and a few studies from different positions. I really love how the graphite sticks work, the lines can be so sensitive and expressive, and it is cable of creating lots of different texture. The only thing I didn’t like is I need to fix it with fixative or it’d smear. I also tried a white board marker (upper right) and ended up with a drawing with lots of straight lines and a graphic look. I’ve also done a few other studies with pastels (chalk pastel, oil pastel, dry pastel) but don’t really like how they turned out. All of these were done on my A4 size sketchbook, but we need to do a final larger piece based on the studies we’ve done, so I went for the graphite sticks again and did a drawing on the most interesting part of the brick (lower right). We were supposed to create something new on the final piece, but I seem to have problems going abstract and my final piece is still quite representational.

I went to the Botanic Garden last week and took lots of photos. Here’s two paintings of the ginger flowers I did based on the photos I took last week. The one on the left was done on a hot press watercolor paper that I bought recently, and the one on the right is on a 135lb heavy weight paper.

Just realized that the first EDM drawing I did was in 2006! I had kinda stopped following the list the last few years, but now I’m re-doing the list all over again, using Paper 53 on the new iPad. I’m posting them on my tumblr blog – whydoodle. I will also post a summary / highlight here from time to time. Hope you’ll enjoy!

Here’s #1 – draw a shoe. I recently bought a few pairs of shoes from my HK trip, and here’s one of them.

shoes

Shoes are such a draw-able subject. I drew another one – the slippers I’m wearing at home.